A new solo exhibition by the artist Agnieszka Gasparska explores our experiences of time and gives form to the nuanced journeys of the lifetimes we share.

On view: January 13-15, 2023
Opening reception: Friday, January 13 at 6-8pm ET
Gallery opening hours: daily at 10am-6pm ET
The Untitled Space
45 Lispenard Street
New York, NY 10013

This event is recommended by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Agnieszka Gasparska’s solo exhibition Drawing Time is a series of meticulously constructed abstract drawings that map the temporal landscapes of twelve lifetimes. Each composed of thousands of tiny, hand-drawn marks, the portraits are accompanied by the mathematical data that each is based on. In contrast to this intransigent information, the drawings themselves are fluid, ethereal, and appear to be suspended in gentle motion, eliciting our awareness of the delicate fragility and beautiful impermanence of the human experience.

Time has long been a favorite subject for Gasparska – in fact, the first drawing that ultimately led to this most recent series dates back to 1998. Our personal experience of time is intangible and always in flux, yet deeply visceral. In many ways, it is also governed by abstract concepts: an hour is a human construct, a week is a construct, so is a month. However, a day as a unit of time is a physical, embodied experience – the earth makes a full rotation over the course of a single day, and as the sun rises, then sets, then rises again, our body knows it. All of the drawings in the exhibition utilize the unit of a day as their tangible and fundamental building block.

Begun in the weeks following the death of her father, who documented and celebrated every day of his adult life by memorializing it in meticulously simple notes jotted down in his calendar, Drawing Time maps the life journeys of twelve fathers loved and lost – including Gasparska’s. Each drawing is a portrait of the intimate landscape of an intertwined lifetime, shaped day by day, dot by dot. Each is also part of a larger on-going body of work. This is a series about life, about love, and about the sublime within the ordinary details of our everyday lives, which are woven into the transcendent whole of everything that we are part of and all that is part of us.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Agnieszka Gasparska is an artist, designer, educator, and explorer based mostly in New York and sometimes in New Mexico. Drawing on two decades of practice as a visual communicator and information architect, Agnieszka gives shape and form to abstract numbers and complex narratives that deepen our understanding of our shared histories, embody the intricacies of human existence, and enliven our experience of the sublime in the everyday. Leveraging a variety of disciplines and techniques including drawing, collage, sculpture, mathematics and interactive technologies, Agnieszka’s work explores themes of time, duality, impermanence, and the interconnectedness of all things.

Agnieszka holds a BFA from the Cooper School of Art, where she was an adjunct professor until 2020. She has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design, and has served as an MFA thesis advisor at the School of Visual Arts. Agnieszka is also the creative captain of Kiss Me I’m Polish, an independent design studio she founded in 2003.

Instagram: @sublimeordinary